Brand Direct is owned by brothers Even and Ricky Newman, Saar Bitton and Marcel Lilan. Until recently, Newman was CEO, director and owner of the Max Stock chain until he sold his shares in it to focus on his private business. Newman was one of the first investors in the Stock chain. , Adidas, New Balance, Timberland, Hugo Boss, Lewis, Diesel and others. In the second phase, Brand Direct is expected to become a shareholder in Avrahami’s company.
The connection between Brand Direct and Avrahami was made by Timor Gordon, a consultant for e-commerce companies, who met Bitton, who was previously VP of Trade and Business Development at Azrieli.com. Avrahami is a 29-year-old entrepreneur from Kfar Chabad, who founded the site in 2015 and became It is a popular and successful brand among ultra-Orthodox and Arab women.
As part of the partnership, Brand Direct has undertaken to handle the field of logistics and distribution, export and development of the Shirel Avrahami brand’s activities in the world. Avrahami will continue to focus on developing, producing and marketing the brand digitally. “We are bringing our strengths to the worlds of technology, logistics and distribution with a great opportunity to open operations in the global world due to our business connections in the world,” Saar Bitton told Calcalist. “We are on our way to several deals around the world, and at the same time are considering entering leading e-commerce platforms. Shirel Avrahami is appealing to an audience looking for modest fashion and its audience is based, among other things, on religious Muslim women.”
For Avrahami, she says the catalyst for bringing in a business partner was the desire to enter new markets quickly. “We have a large audience of Arabs who buy and promote and we realized that we need to go abroad with the brand,” Avrahami tells Calcalist.
According to Avrahami, one of the initial sites will be Zelando: “I realized that we had to move abroad and I was debating whether it would be the United States or Arab countries, because I have a lot of Arab customers. I told them that our sales expectation was 600,000 euros, and in Zellando they said that the brand could reach sales of one million euros a year and asked that we start immediately without waiting. Here I realized that in order to get to Zlando I need a much wider arm and I was looking for a partner to help me go abroad.
Are you looking for a financial back?
“To copy my entire procedure overseas, I need to produce much more and in advance because only the shipment by sea takes two months. This means that I need personnel and dedicated production personnel only for operations abroad in parallel with operations in Israel, and it also requires money because I have to produce twice as much goods. Then I met Timor Gordon and he linked me to Brand Direct. “And he and Saar agreed to join me. We signed a cooperation agreement last week, of course not before I received a blessing from the Rebbe of Lubavitch.”
What is the division of labor between you and Brand Direct?
“All my inventory sits from today on Brand’s Marlog honestly. They are in charge of the packaging and shipping, and I am good at marketing and manufacturing. This is my specialty and this is what I will focus on. I create my own digital campaigns on my own and have content people working with me. “Brand takes it upon themselves to take care of everything that happens from the moment the garment leaves the factory until it reaches the customer in Israel or abroad. They have the ability to take the entire logistics set-up and take it off my shoulders and export it to sites around the world.”
“I have been trying for a long time to get to Terminal X and produce a collection for them for ultra-Orthodox women, but I did not succeed even though I did a dedicated collection for Yanga in the past in collaboration that was very successful. We called her Shirel Avrahami Lianga. Just when I took out the collection the second closure of the Corona started and all the Yanga stores closed. It came from heaven that I do not have stores and most of the goods I produced for them in the end I sold through my website. ”
Maybe the target audience was not right?
“If you do not produce modest fashion, you can not expect religious and Arabs to buy from you. Terminal X is a large and well-known site, and there is no reason why Arab and ultra-Orthodox women will not buy it. I go into it, but apart from shoes I can not buy anything because it is the only product Which meets my requirements as a religious girl.Even if Zara makes a second item for 1 shekel it will not help me, because it will not suit me at the levels of modesty I adhere to.The loyalty of my clientele is high no matter what the price of the item.
Avrahami came to the fashion industry at the age of 20 quite by accident. She can send the flowers to the teacher seminary teacher who punished her. “I grew up in the village of Chabad,” Avrahami describes, “and I studied at a teachers’ seminary. In the second year of school, when I was 19, I was supposed to go on a mission abroad on behalf of the seminary. I did not fly abroad alive. One day the director of the seminary called me into the room and told me I was not going on a mission, and opened a folder on his computer where you see pictures from my Facebook that reveal my knee and elbow. Said he could not confirm me to the Rebbe. It’s hard to understand the level of rupture of a girl who’s all her life has been waiting for this moment. “Every time I think about it, my stomach turns, even though ten years have passed.”
What did you do at this point that you realized your dream was shattered?
“I did not know what I was doing from here. I stayed to study at the seminary and got to know my husband Israel. He believed in me very much. He told me: ‘You are energetic and you know how to speak, so why stay in this place? Write to the Rebbe and ask for his blessing.’ Congratulations on taking my pros and cons and getting going. I started an Instagram that exploded very quickly because the ultra-Orthodox community was thirsty for it. I uploaded pictures of myself with locks like everyone else uploads, and showed what I do in my daily life. Anonymity gathered around me on Instagram. I slowly paved the way for myself with individual items I started selling. Before me there were no e-commerce sites for the ultra-Orthodox because the thought was that the ultra-Orthodox did not have a cell phone and they were not online. I built the brand with NIS 30,000 that I took from the bank, because that is the amount they agreed to give me, and it grew from scratch on social media. ”
Where do you make the items?
“At first I made in Turkey and then I moved to China. Half a year before Corona I decided I had to make something more unique than everyone else does in the market because everyone makes in China and makes the same models from the same fabrics. I returned to Israel to make more unique fashion. “Then the crowd that gathered around us was a quality crowd that cared about the environment. Even Tzipi Livni bought from us. We moved to Israel half a year before the corona and then when the corona broke, my whole environment got stuck with no ability to export goods from China. I saw private supervision, I had plenty of goods.”
Your prices are high. Why sell a swimsuit for NIS 600?
“There are many fashion sites, but the difference between them is that they are a business and I am a brand. To make a person take 600 shekels out of his pocket, he needs to feel emotion for the brand, feel happy to take out his wallet. When a girl buys my clothes “La Style. This is an agenda and not just a garment. The fact that I produce in Israel also makes the item more expensive. I do not employ Chinese workers under conditions. For NIS 100, it is impossible to bring quality and crazy style. Whoever buys from me is a different customer.”
“I do not like, do not buy and do not believe in stores. I believe that the money is better to put in marketing.”